Collaborative Information Seeking in Electronic Environments

Abstract

Collaboration in information seeking, while common in practice, is just being recognized as an important research area. Several studies have documented various collaboration strategies that people have adopted (and adapted), and some initial systems have been built. This field is in its infancy, however. We need to understand which real-world tasks are best suited for collaborative work. We need to extend models of information seeking to accommodate explicit and implicit collaboration. We need to invent a suite of algorithms to mediate search activities. We need to devise evaluation metrics that take into account multiple people’s contributions to search.